Agenda item

To receive an update and review implementation of the Knife Crime scrutiny recommendations agreed by Cabinet on 14 October 2019.

Councillor Promise Knight (Lead Member for Community Safety and Engagement, Brent Council) introduced the report which provided an update and highlighted the actions partners had taken to ensure the issue of knife crime was addressed in the borough. She hoped the Committee were assured that the 13 recommendations from the Scrutiny Task Group had been implemented sufficiently and had enriched the continuing focus on knife crime.

The Committee was then invited to raise questions on the update provided, which focussed on a number of key areas as highlighted below:

• In relation to the recommendation on the out of hour’s use of schools, there was a continuing conversation with schools and children’s services. Some schools had been able to offer additional provision and prioritised having that space and community offer, but affordability was a factor. There had not been a great uptake of funding from MOPAC for the delivery of afterschool activities and that budget had been rolled over. Some schools offered afterschool services within their financial remit, and the Safer Neighbourhoods Board had used funding to support some of those activities.
• Considering recommendation 9, the Committee were advised that probation now operated in a new format going back to a national probation service. Brent had benefited from this as there was a service within Brent overseeing caseworkers in Brent. The commitment to partnership operations had improved in the 6 months since it had been operating that way, and the probation service had been a huge benefit to the Summer Nights Programme which targeted known offenders of concern to the borough.
• In relation to Community and Voluntary Sector (CVS) and smaller local community groups, it was highlighted that the Global Thinking Project was a consortium of smaller local community voluntary organisations, underpinned through the Young Brent Foundation, who had been successful in delivering a localised project. This was an area Community Safety had pushed on, trying to strengthen the network to enable more positive chances for those organisations to be successful in contract bidding. From a Strategy and Partnerships Perspective, the voluntary and community group work in the area of community safety was very specialist, with a limited number of organisations working with a defined cohort, such as victims of CSE or VAWG. There was crossover in the organisations Community Safety and Strategy and Partnerships worked with, but many of the specific organisations were likely to be micro. Councillor Knight added that there was a model of collaboration for the work done with CVS, supporting one another to be intersectional.
• Considering the increase in gun crime, officers advised that gun crime was recorded every time a lethal barrel gunfire was released, so where 4 gunshots were released 4 incidents would be recorded. The statistics for gun crime had decreased in Brent compared to 5-6 years ago, but it was an issue. The Committee heard that early intervention was key. Supt Tania Martin (Met Police) added that it was an area the police took particularly seriously, with any intelligence received assessed very quickly and dealt with as effectively as possible. Over the summer the police had been able to attract additional resources from the wider Met Police to assist with trying to make sure gun crime did not cause any further issues. This area was monitored continually throughout the course of 24 hours each day.
• Focusing on reoffending gang crime, officers advised of the Violence Vulnerability Programme. Of a cohort of 253 individuals, 72% had not been known to re-offend during the reporting period. When officers considered the vulnerable lifestyles those individuals led, a 72% non-reoffending figure was very good compared across London. In terms of the Reoffender Management Programme, made up of prolific high offenders, the report detailed the cost of crime and total number of offenses prior to support from the programme, and compared that to the reduction in cost of crime and number of offenses during that support period. For example, during the reporting period prior to support there was a total number of offenses of 2,789, compared to 585 following intervention and support.

The Committee did not make any recommendations in relation to the item discussed, but made several requests for information, recorded as follows:

i)             For the Committee to be provided with statistics for reoffending from the probation service.

ii)            For the Committee to be provided with the number and names of schools who were currently fulfilling the Knife Crime Task Group Recommendation around out of hours opening.